Impress your guests with locally-sourced wine

If you’re getting married in England, you may already be aware that you’ll have no problem getting hold of home-grown wine if you want to serve it at your wedding. What you may not realise is that quite a lot of it is of extremely high quality, tastes at least as good as most overseas varieties and is relatively inexpensive.

English wine is a great option if you’re trying to make your wedding as green as possible, as fewer food miles means less C02. Many vareities are also organic, which is great on both health and environmental fronts. If you’re a committed green, the chance to introduce as many of your friends as possible to tastier, greener varieits has obvious appeal, but even to the biggest environmental sinners there’s an appeal to serving up wine that’s somehow so ‘exotic’ despite coming from our own soil. And if you want champagne, you can get that too.

Follow the jump for my recommendations.

Being a bit of a greenie, I’ve tried quite a few UK varieties and have been pleasantly surprised by some of the wines I’ve tried recently. The first time I tried English wine, it tasted a bit like weak apple juice, but things have really come on.

Sedlescombe Organic Wine, whose vineyards are in East Sussex, is a good option, offering two types of white wine (one dry, one a bit more fruity) at a good price (£9.95 a bottle with a 10% discount on orders for the 12-bottle case). They also make rose and even a red wine from their English grapes. Having sampled all these at a recent tasting, I have to say that my favourite out of all the wines was their Bodium Harvest, which is a ripe and complex medium-dry.

The dry white, which is a great palate cleanser, may be better for food so it more suited to your wedding breakfast. One thing I love about this wine is that it comes from the fantastic vintage of 2006, which many of us will remember was an unusually long and hot summer, with many days over 30 degrees here in the UK. It’s a real novelty to be able to recall the weather that gave rise to your drink!

Sedlescombe also make sparkling wines and liqueurs.

Another of my favourite UK varieties that I’d be more than happy to serve at my dream wedding would be Chapel Down’s outstanding range of English wines. They use the bacchus grape – a popular UK variety due to its hardiness – to make a stunning award-winning white wine with top notes of roses and lychee – ideal for summer weddings.

These are just a few of my favourite English wines, but there are many more to discover. Check out Vintage Roots for more wines, spirits, beers and ciders that haven’t got far to travel.